ARTS & CULTURE

Love Stinks

In March, the Fine Arts Department hosted three double bills of the “The Telephone” and “Trouble in Tahiti.”

“The Telephone” tells the story of Ben who is desperate to get the attention of his true love Lucy so he can pop the question. But Lucy just can’t be distracted from her obsession with the telephone. Finally, he calls Lucy from a telephone booth outside on the street and proposes. She consents, and the two join in a romantic duet over the phone line.

Putting a modern twist on the opera, which was written in 1947, Eduardo Valdes as Ben used a Bluetooth device instead of a telephone in the last scene. Dr. Beverly Coulter, a professor of fine arts, sang the role of Lucy.

Only two characters appear on stage in Leonard Bernstein’s “Trouble in Tahiti,” which is set in a nameless 1950s American suburb. Dinah, sung by senior Elizabeth Gerrard, is unhappy with her philandering husband Sam, sung by freshman Giovanni Maschi. The opera has been described as a “story of a day in the life of two simple, desperately unhappy people.” In fact, at the end the characters are left in the same position that they were when the opera began.